Pension plunderer Robert Maxwell remembered 20 years after his death

As soon as I entered the office of the Today newspaper on the afternoon of Tuesday 5 November 1991 I knew something had happened.

There was that unmistakeable newsroom hubbub that occurs only when a big story has just broken.

I had no time to ask what it was about because several journalists were already running towards me and shouting. Behind them, I saw a beaming editor, Martin Dunn, emerging from his office.

"Maxwell's missing... his plane's gone down... Martin wants you urgently... isn't it amazing... you can have all the space you want... take my terminal... the shares have been suspended..."

By the time Martin reached me he was screaming too: "Roy, thank God you're here. Just write - you know, all the stories you keep telling us. Soon as you can."

Within a couple of minutes we discovered that the plane report was wrong. Maxwell was missing from his yacht, which had not gone down. Maxwell had.

It looked as though the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, The People, Daily Record, New York Daily News and a raft of titles elsewhere across the world plus several book publishers, including Macmillan - had fallen overboard and drowned.

For the first and, as yet, only time in my journalistic career I froze in front of a keyboard. Maxwell had haunted me for the previous 23 months and I couldn't believe he had vanished in an instant.

He had called me out of the blue on 26 December 1989 and later that day offered me the editorship of the Daily Mirror.

I moved into the chair at the beginning of the following March and we soon fell out. Maxwell was impossible to work for, a mercurial man with a monstrous ego.

Our clashes are dealt with in detail in my book Maxwell's Fall (available for 1p on Amazon). I stayed only to March 1991 and, after my departure, he pursued me through the courts for a supposed breach of contract (I won the case, but the legal costs, even in victory, were enormous).

Though I had to serve six months "gardening leave", Rupert Murdoch generously offered me the consultant editorship of both Today and the Sunday Times, my previous newspaper berth.

But Maxwell was never off my mind. At Today, I wrote often about his obvious business problems. It became clear throughout the summer of 1991 that he was in trouble.

In the early autumn, BBC1 broadcast a Panorama devoted to Maxwell's problems. I acted as a consultant. Meanwhile, the Financial Times was running stories that questioned whether Maxwell could afford to pay his debts.

It was clear that Maxwell was moving money around between his companies while desperately attempt to stave off demands from banks, notably Goldman Sachs, to repay loans.

This was the harsh financial background to his sudden decision to take a break alone on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, which was moored in Gibraltar.

He sailed first to Madeira and a couple of days later on to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Over those days he received several faxes, all containing bad news about his financial dealings.

In the evening after his arrival he instructed his captain to put to sea for a cruise and some time that night he went overboard. His body was recovered from the sea after a helicopter search.

However, he was still missing when I sat, unmoving and numb in the Today office, while trying to begin writing the scores of anecdotes I had been telling and retelling over the previous months.

Eventually, I did the job, accepting advice from the man then in charge of Wapping, Andrew Knight, not to be unduly unkind to the tyrant.

At that time, of course, we had no idea about the story that would break almost a month later to reveal that Maxwell had committed a massive fraud by plundering his employees' pension funds in order to shore up his companies.

Despite good work by many people at the time and since the legacy of that plunder still has an effect on Mirror pensioners (of whom, I'm about to be one).

I recall all this because BBC Radio 4 is going to broadcast a special archive hour on Saturday evening to mark the 20th anniversary of Maxwell's death.

Steve Hewlett has interviewed a host of people who witnessed the madness of Maxwell.

They include Alastair Campbell (former Mirror political editor) talking about flying to Ethiopia with Maxwell, who acted in front of the cameras as if he was a world leader before leaving a note that said: "My work here is done, I've gone back to London to resolve the miner's strike."

Print union leader Brenda Dean tells a bouncing cheque anecdote while Peter Jay (economist, former US ambassador and Maxwell's chief of staff for three years) talks about how poorly Maxwell treated him - but he didn't give a damn.

And there is even an interview with one of Maxwell's "other women", Wendy Leigh. She gives an account of their tryst in Geneva, in which she says Maxwell told her: "I haven't brought you here to make love to you, but because I think you're so interesting."

She replied: "But why is there only one suite?" She goes on to say that there was a fundamental dishonesty about everything he said and did.